One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a mother--especially in these anxious, winner-takes-all times--is the need to resist the urge to accept someone else's definition of success and to try to figure out, instead, what really is best for my own children, what unique combination of structure and freedom, nurturing and challenge, education and exploration, each of them needs in order to grow and bloom. p. 24
Rather than try to project who our older son might or might not one day turn out to be, we needed to try to appreciate and understand who he was right now. And then we needed to meet him there, loving and accepting him just as he was, supporting his journey of self-discovery, crooked and long though his path might turn out to be. When we began to see it this way, our own path suddenly seemed clearer. p. 26
"The definition of the 'best' is pretty limiting in our culture, and it doesn't seem to take into account the fact that every kid is different... I've had to make decisions with my daughter that made her feel happy and fulfilled now, instead of pushing her to do things just because they'd look good someday on a college application." (quoting a friend) p. 27
"Our children drop into our neat, tightly governed lives like small, rowdy Buddhist masters, each of them sent to teach us the hard lessons we most need to learn." Jon Kabat-Zinn p. 27
But a few things came into clearer focus as we began the work of bringing one long life chapter to a close and embarking on a new one. We could love the home we'd had and leave it anyway, leave it without knowing what would replace it. Really we had no choice. But we also came to see that a gift can only be received with an open hand, and in order to find out what life was about to offer us, we would first have to release our hold on what was already over. That in itself proved to be quite a challenge and certainly a good lesson for our sons to learn. p. 28-29
And I realize that whatever it was I'd hoped to accomplish this night has indeed occurred. Surely each one of us, sitting close by one another on the crest of this hill, feels blessed to be here, grateful that fate, or circumstance, has led us tonight to this particular spot in the world and no other. p. 48
If happiness really could be bought, surely most of us would feel much more satisfied than we do, blessed as we are with such an abundance of good food, beautiful places to live, accessible education, entertainment, opportunity. Yet our impulse, our human nature, seems always to be to strive for more. More wealth, more recognition, more stuff. p. 56
It may be that success lies as much in our ability to behold the world before us in gratitude and wonder as it does in owning things and doing things. And it may be, too, that happiness really is a state of mind we choose for ourselves, a way of being that we cultivate from one moment to the next, rather than the result of realizing our ambitions or acquiring whatever it is we think we most desire. p. 56
I think the word ordinary has a bad rap. We encourage our children to srive to lead extraordinary lives, in the belief that such striving is not only admirable but necessary if they are to realize their goals and grow into fulfilled, successful adults. Many of us live in fear that our children may not live up to their potential, may fall behind their peers, may fail to embody our--or the culture's--notions of success.
But as I've watched my sons and their friends meet the demands of their lives, as I listen to other parents share their worries about college rankings and admission percentages, their children's future carreers and life shoices, I can't help but wonder, What is the cost of all this striving? And what gets lost in our relentless push to achieve, have, and do more?
It's easy, given the times we live in and the implicit messages we absorb each day, to equate a good life with having a lot and doing a lot. So it's also easy to fall into believing that our children, if they are to succeed in life, need to be terrific at everything, and that it's up to us to make sure that they are--to keep them on track through tougher course loads, more activities, more competitive sports, more summer programs. But in all our well-intentioned efforts to do the right thing for our teenage children, we may be failing to provide them with something that is truly essential--the time and space they need to wake up to themselves, to grow acquainted with their own innate gifts, to dream their dreams and discover their true natures. p. 57-58
Moment by moment, we have the opportunity to say yes, to move into our lives and open ourselves to the adventure--but that doesn't mean that we ever really know where we're going or that we can predict what we'll find when we get there. If we're lucky, though, the life we end up leading is one that makes us feel alive. p. 64
If you share a house with teenagers, you know exactly what it's like to live under surveillance, to be monitored for the slightest inconsistency in thought, word, or deed. Observed by the merciless eye of youth, we are judged without pity and, as often as not, found wanting. Where once they gazed upon me lovingly, my adolescent sons are now more than happy to point out my every fault and shortcoming. p. 68
I could choose to worry, to turn my clammy fear about "what next" into anger at being dismissed so summarily. Or I could try to follow my sons' lead and accept this unexpected ending not as a disaster, but as yet another chance to move in a new direction. And isn't this, after all, the lesson I would most want the two of them to learn? That we can't always choose what happens to us, can't always pick the hand we're dealt--but we can choose our response and decide how to play the hand we have. p. 70
...can I be grateful for what I've had and at the same moment embrace the practice of letting it go? p. 71
It occurs to me that perhaps I don't have to push at life quite so hard after all, that sometimes the best thing we can do is allow our lives simply to take us where we need to go. The truth is, I don't have any idea what goals I should be focusing on or how I ought to compose my life at this juncture... p. 86
But as all the identities I worked so hard to construct over the years begin to slough away, I feel myself reconnecting with my own quiet center. It is as if I am, at last, catching a glimpse of myself not as I might wish to be, but as I am. I see a woman who is less ambitious than she one was. Someone less self-conscious, less invested in appearances, but also less "special' than the person I always thought I was meant to be. I see my own ordinariness. And I see that to be ordinary is ok after all. p. 87
But now I begin to view our time together differently, begin to see that stepping up to one's life adventure doesn't necessarily mean doing extraordinary things. It also means coming to understand that viewed in the right light, through the right eyes, everything is extraordinary. p. 90
Releasing my death grip on perfection, I realize that of course our house does not need to be "just so." The quality of our lives within it's walls will not be improved by any of my decorating home runs, nor will it be diminished by my strikeouts. Were I to insist on perfection, nothing in the house would ever be finished to my satisfaction anyway. p. 101
I realize I've already wasted months fussing over making the "best" choices, when all I really needed to do was make some good choices, accept them without looking back, and move on to the next. It seems to be a lesson I need to learn again and again. p. 102
The hardest part of being a parent may be learning to live with the fact that there are so many things that we simply can't control, so much of the journey that is not our doing at all, but rather the work of the gods, the unfolding of destiny, fate. We give birth to our children, we love and cherish them, but we don't form or own them, any more than we can own the flowers blooming at our doorsteps or the land upon which we build our homes and invest our dreams. We may tend the garden for a while, take our brief turn upon the land, nurture the children delivered into our arms, but in truth we possess none of these things, nor can we write any life story but our own. It's a truth I had to confront right away, one that I'm still struggling to accept seventeen years later. p. 111-112
I began to understand that perhaps the best thing I could do for both my children was not to grab them by the hand and dive each day into the great rushing river of life, but instead to create for them, for all of us, a protected island, a quiet place from which we could hold the world and its busyness at bay for a while. p. 120
Being a good mom, it had always seemed to me, meant taking advantage of the many opportunities and experiences available to all of us. A full calendar, a busy life, a packed schedule, meant that I was doing my job, ensuring that my children were getting the experiences they needed in order to grow up prepared to compete in a complex world.
By the time Jack arrived in the airy, rose-colored kindergarten classroom, I had begun to wonder if, in the midst of all our comings and goings, we were missing something even more important than any swim lesson or playdate. My children were just five and eight years old, still so young, yet it felt as if our life together had become a blur of activity, our travels dictated by our array of exracurricular activities, school schedules, work schedules, and social schedules. p. 121
Giving up at this point...just too many things I would type out!!
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
What to read when
Not a book for me right now...but would be interesting for a younger mother.
Here is where, as a parent, you will accompany your child through this essential journey of making choices and finding acceptance, standing up for yourself, and knowing when to forgive. Books give you ways to talk to your children about these big ideas. Later, when your child is on the brink of leaving childhood behind, you want to share words with your child that will help her move more gracefully into young adulthood. According to the poet Billy Collins, poetry tells the history of the human heart. But I think that all of great literature maps the human heart, and children's literature knows how to do so best of all. p. 4
As a child, books were my transport. Through reading, I discovered worlds of people I had not known before. I read stories about history and places and people that moved me, reduced me to tears, brought me off of my couch and on a journey that never ended. p. 4
Here is where, as a parent, you will accompany your child through this essential journey of making choices and finding acceptance, standing up for yourself, and knowing when to forgive. Books give you ways to talk to your children about these big ideas. Later, when your child is on the brink of leaving childhood behind, you want to share words with your child that will help her move more gracefully into young adulthood. According to the poet Billy Collins, poetry tells the history of the human heart. But I think that all of great literature maps the human heart, and children's literature knows how to do so best of all. p. 4
As a child, books were my transport. Through reading, I discovered worlds of people I had not known before. I read stories about history and places and people that moved me, reduced me to tears, brought me off of my couch and on a journey that never ended. p. 4
Sunday, October 27, 2013
My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
Eventually, we became friends, and as we did, our conversations often edged into bigger themes that were written between teh lines of the daily procedures: the explosion of misdemeanors that seemed more symptomatic of social ills than evidence of criminal natures; the crudeness of the tools the system wielded against complicated problems. p. 203
I don't view prosecutors and defense attorneys as natural enemiles, however common that view is both within and without the legal profession. The two simply have different roles to play in pursuit of the larger purpose realizing the rule of law. Though the roles are oppositional, their very existence depends on a shared acceptance of the law's judgement no matter the passion of either side for a desires outcome...neither the accused nor society is served unless the integrity of the system is set above the expedient purposes of either side. p. 204
I have followed my mother's approact to family, refusing to limit myself to accidents of birth, blood, and marriage. p. 229
Sharing was not my style; my problems were mine to deal with...inside I remained very much alone....It was not until these years after the DA's Office, as I started making more purposeful strides toward the person I wanted to be professionally, that i could begin to dream of reshaping the person I was emotionally, too. My faith in my potential for self-improvement, which had been teh foundation for all my academic and professional success so far, would not be tested in more inaccessible regions of the self. But I was optimistic: if I could help fix your problems, surely I can fix my own.
I'd always believed people can change; very few are carved in stone or beyond redemption. All my life I've looked around me and asked; What can I learn here? What qualities in this friend, this mentor, even this rival, are worth emulating? What in me needs to change? Even as a child, I could reflect that my anger was accomplishing nothing, hurting only myself, and that I had to learn to stop in my tracks the instant I felt its surge. Learning to be open about my illness was a first step and it taught me how admitting your vulnerabilities can bring people closer. Friends want to help, and it's important to know how to accept help graciously, just as it's better to accept a gift with "Thank you" than "You shouldn't have."
If there's a measure of how well I've succeeded in this self-transformation, it's that very few of my friends--even those who have known me the longest--can remember the person I was before undertaking the effort. Such is the nature of familiarity and memory. They also swear that they've always known about my diabetes and claim memories of seeing me give myself shots long before I ever did so openly. But there is not better indicator of progress, or cause for pride, than the thaw in relations with my mother.
I wouldn't suffer the same lack of examples as my mother. Friends would show me how to be warm, and I would learn by allowing others a chance to do for me as they had let me do for them, until no one remembered a time when it was not that way. As I learned, I practiced on my mother--a real hug, a sincere compliment, an extra effort to let down my guard--and miraculously she softened in turn, out of instinct long dormant, even if she didn't quite know what was going on. Opening up, I came to recognize the value of vulnerability and to honor it... p. 279-281
If you helf to principle so passionately, so inflexibly, indifferent to the particulars of circumstance--the full range of what human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, might endure or create--if you enthroned principle above even reason, weren't you abdicating some of the responsibilities of a thinking person?
There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. Concern for individuals, the imperative of treating them with dignity and respect for their ideas and needs, regardless of one's own views--these too are surely principles and as worthy as any of being deemed inviolable. p. 300-301
I don't view prosecutors and defense attorneys as natural enemiles, however common that view is both within and without the legal profession. The two simply have different roles to play in pursuit of the larger purpose realizing the rule of law. Though the roles are oppositional, their very existence depends on a shared acceptance of the law's judgement no matter the passion of either side for a desires outcome...neither the accused nor society is served unless the integrity of the system is set above the expedient purposes of either side. p. 204
I have followed my mother's approact to family, refusing to limit myself to accidents of birth, blood, and marriage. p. 229
Sharing was not my style; my problems were mine to deal with...inside I remained very much alone....It was not until these years after the DA's Office, as I started making more purposeful strides toward the person I wanted to be professionally, that i could begin to dream of reshaping the person I was emotionally, too. My faith in my potential for self-improvement, which had been teh foundation for all my academic and professional success so far, would not be tested in more inaccessible regions of the self. But I was optimistic: if I could help fix your problems, surely I can fix my own.
I'd always believed people can change; very few are carved in stone or beyond redemption. All my life I've looked around me and asked; What can I learn here? What qualities in this friend, this mentor, even this rival, are worth emulating? What in me needs to change? Even as a child, I could reflect that my anger was accomplishing nothing, hurting only myself, and that I had to learn to stop in my tracks the instant I felt its surge. Learning to be open about my illness was a first step and it taught me how admitting your vulnerabilities can bring people closer. Friends want to help, and it's important to know how to accept help graciously, just as it's better to accept a gift with "Thank you" than "You shouldn't have."
If there's a measure of how well I've succeeded in this self-transformation, it's that very few of my friends--even those who have known me the longest--can remember the person I was before undertaking the effort. Such is the nature of familiarity and memory. They also swear that they've always known about my diabetes and claim memories of seeing me give myself shots long before I ever did so openly. But there is not better indicator of progress, or cause for pride, than the thaw in relations with my mother.
I wouldn't suffer the same lack of examples as my mother. Friends would show me how to be warm, and I would learn by allowing others a chance to do for me as they had let me do for them, until no one remembered a time when it was not that way. As I learned, I practiced on my mother--a real hug, a sincere compliment, an extra effort to let down my guard--and miraculously she softened in turn, out of instinct long dormant, even if she didn't quite know what was going on. Opening up, I came to recognize the value of vulnerability and to honor it... p. 279-281
If you helf to principle so passionately, so inflexibly, indifferent to the particulars of circumstance--the full range of what human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, might endure or create--if you enthroned principle above even reason, weren't you abdicating some of the responsibilities of a thinking person?
There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. Concern for individuals, the imperative of treating them with dignity and respect for their ideas and needs, regardless of one's own views--these too are surely principles and as worthy as any of being deemed inviolable. p. 300-301
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Sunday, September 29, 2013
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it as I have created you. p. 59
...most of our greatest fears are relational. It's all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love. We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is it all comes down to relationships.
...essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability, and then they find themselves at an ending that seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. he didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. p. 69
You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness. p. 86
The real Voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated Voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The Voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom that says, Hold your tongue; don't talk about that person that way; forgive the friend you haven't talked to; don't look at that woman as a possession; I want to show you the sunset; look and see how short life is and how your troubles are not worth worrying about; buy that bottle of wine and call your friend and see if he can get together, because remember, he was supposed to have that conversation with his daughter, and you should ask him about it.
So as I was writing my novel, and as my characters did what he wanted, I became more and more aware that someone was writing me. So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer. I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences that I could live through.
At first, even though I could feel God writing something different, I'd play the scene the way I wanted. This never worked. It would always have been better to obey the Writer, the one who knows the better story. I'd talk poorly about someone and immediately know I'd done it because I was insecure and I'd know I was a weak character who was jealous and undisciplined.
So I started obeying a little. I'd feel God wanting me to hold my tongue, and I would. It didn't feel natural at first; it felt fake, like I wwas being a character someone else wanted me to be and not who I actually was; but if I held my tongue, the scene would play better, and I always felt better when it was done. I started feling like a better character, and when you are a better character, your story gets better too. p. 87-88
If I learned anything from thinking about my father, it's that there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful in to the world. I guess what I'm saying is, I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching people around us that life just isn't worth living.
I don't know why there are dark forces in the world, but there are. And I don't know why God allows dark forces to enter into our stories, but he does. p.116
Advertising does exactly this. We watch a commercial advertising a new volvo, and suddenly we feel our life isn't as content as it once was. Our life doesn't have the new volvo in it. And the commercial convinces us we will only be content if we have a car with forty seven airbags. And so we begin our story of buying a volvo, only to repeat the story with a new weed eater and then a new home stereo. And this can go on for a lifetime. When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives, and what was the meaning. p. 123
The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you remembered. The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. p177
Writing a story isn't about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn't think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it's conflict that changes a person. p. 180
...enjoyed the natural high the body creates to trick us into thinking another human being might rescue us... p. 190
The oldest book of the Bible is supposedly the book of Job. It is a book about suffering, and it reads as though God is saying to the world, Before we get started, there's this one thing I have to tell you. Things are going to get bad.
Job is a good man whom God allows to be destroyed, except for his life.... Job calls out to God, asking why God would let this happen.
God does not answer Job's question. It's as though God starts off his message to the world by explaining there are painful realities in this life we cannot and will never understand. Instead, he appears to Job in a whirlwind and asks if Job knows who stops the waves on the shore or stores the snow in Wichita every winter. He asks Job who manages the constellations that reel though the night sky.
And that is essentially all God says to Job. God doesn't explain pain philosophically or even list its benefits. God says to Job, Job I know what I am doing, and this whole thing isn't about you.
Job responds, even before his health and wealth are restored by saying, "All of this is too wonderful for me." Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health, or stability. he understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story than he did about himself. p. 197
But regardless how passionate the utopianists are, I simply don't believe we are going to be rescued. I don't believe an act of man will make things on earth perfect, and I don't believe God will intervene before I die, or for that matter before you die. I believe, instead, that we will go on longing for a resolution that will not come, not within life as we know it anyway.
If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such and such a car or such and such a spouse or job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status....
I saw a story on 60 minutes a few months ago about the happiest country in the world. It was Denmark. Ruling out financial status, physical health, and even social freedom...the single charasteristic of the Danes that allowed them such contentment was this: they had low expectations.
I'm not making that up. There is something in Denmark's culture that allows them to look at life realistically. They don't expect products to fulfill them or relationships to end all their problems. p. 201-202
Growing up in church we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle shaped hold in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hold never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie....I think Jesus can make things better, but I don't think he is going to make things perfect. not here, and not now.
What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul has hope our souls will be made complete...Paul says Jesus is the hope that will not disappoint. I find that comforting. That helps me get through the day, to be honest. It even makes me content somehow. Maybe that's what Paul meant when he said he'd learned the secret of contentment. p. 204
...as I continued to see a counselor, I realized that for years I'd thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion...it's too much pressure to put on a person. I think that's why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don't get that, they feel as though they're going to die. p. 204
....when I think back on those six weeks, what I really remember are the few times we made an extra effort to do something memorable. We took my dog Lucy for a hike and introduced her to her first waterfall. We took the kayaks out on the river and strapped them together to have a floating picnic. When we look back at our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out. p. 209
I like those scenes in the Bible where God stops people and asks them to build an altar. You'd think He was making them do that for Himself, but I don't think God really gets much from looking at a pile of rocks. Instead, I think God wanted his people to build altars for their sake, something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time they were rescued, or they were given grace. p. 214
I hated that it took pain to open the curtain revealing the man's heart, but it did and it does. We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending. p. 223
...She did not want to let on that she was weak or the end was near. Her friend softly explained the need for a show of strength was over and that she should be fully present in the reality of her story and say good-bye. p. 224
...I wondered how much it costs to be rich in friends and how many years and stories and scenes it takes to make a rich life happen. You' can't build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch, I thought to myself. p. 228
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything. p. 231
It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a joy you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It's as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help. p. 246
...most of our greatest fears are relational. It's all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love. We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is it all comes down to relationships.
...essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long middle in which they are compelled to search for a mate and reproduce and also create stability out of natural instability, and then they find themselves at an ending that seems to be designed for reflection. At the end, their bodies are slower, they are not as easily distracted, they do less work, and they think and feel about a life lived rather than look forward to a life getting started. he didn't know what the point of the journey was, but he did believe we were designed to search for and find something. And he wondered out loud if the point wasn't the search but the transformation the search creates. p. 69
You can call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness. p. 86
The real Voice is stiller and smaller and seems to know, without confusion, the difference between right and wrong and the subtle delineation between the beautiful and profane. It's not an agitated Voice, but ever patient as though it approves a million false starts. The Voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom that says, Hold your tongue; don't talk about that person that way; forgive the friend you haven't talked to; don't look at that woman as a possession; I want to show you the sunset; look and see how short life is and how your troubles are not worth worrying about; buy that bottle of wine and call your friend and see if he can get together, because remember, he was supposed to have that conversation with his daughter, and you should ask him about it.
So as I was writing my novel, and as my characters did what he wanted, I became more and more aware that someone was writing me. So I started listening to the Voice, or rather, I started calling it the Voice and admitting there was a Writer. I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences that I could live through.
At first, even though I could feel God writing something different, I'd play the scene the way I wanted. This never worked. It would always have been better to obey the Writer, the one who knows the better story. I'd talk poorly about someone and immediately know I'd done it because I was insecure and I'd know I was a weak character who was jealous and undisciplined.
So I started obeying a little. I'd feel God wanting me to hold my tongue, and I would. It didn't feel natural at first; it felt fake, like I wwas being a character someone else wanted me to be and not who I actually was; but if I held my tongue, the scene would play better, and I always felt better when it was done. I started feling like a better character, and when you are a better character, your story gets better too. p. 87-88
If I learned anything from thinking about my father, it's that there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful in to the world. I guess what I'm saying is, I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching people around us that life just isn't worth living.
I don't know why there are dark forces in the world, but there are. And I don't know why God allows dark forces to enter into our stories, but he does. p.116
Advertising does exactly this. We watch a commercial advertising a new volvo, and suddenly we feel our life isn't as content as it once was. Our life doesn't have the new volvo in it. And the commercial convinces us we will only be content if we have a car with forty seven airbags. And so we begin our story of buying a volvo, only to repeat the story with a new weed eater and then a new home stereo. And this can go on for a lifetime. When the credits roll, we wonder what we did with our lives, and what was the meaning. p. 123
The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you remembered. The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It's about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. p177
Writing a story isn't about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn't think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it's conflict that changes a person. p. 180
...enjoyed the natural high the body creates to trick us into thinking another human being might rescue us... p. 190
The oldest book of the Bible is supposedly the book of Job. It is a book about suffering, and it reads as though God is saying to the world, Before we get started, there's this one thing I have to tell you. Things are going to get bad.
Job is a good man whom God allows to be destroyed, except for his life.... Job calls out to God, asking why God would let this happen.
God does not answer Job's question. It's as though God starts off his message to the world by explaining there are painful realities in this life we cannot and will never understand. Instead, he appears to Job in a whirlwind and asks if Job knows who stops the waves on the shore or stores the snow in Wichita every winter. He asks Job who manages the constellations that reel though the night sky.
And that is essentially all God says to Job. God doesn't explain pain philosophically or even list its benefits. God says to Job, Job I know what I am doing, and this whole thing isn't about you.
Job responds, even before his health and wealth are restored by saying, "All of this is too wonderful for me." Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health, or stability. he understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story than he did about himself. p. 197
But regardless how passionate the utopianists are, I simply don't believe we are going to be rescued. I don't believe an act of man will make things on earth perfect, and I don't believe God will intervene before I die, or for that matter before you die. I believe, instead, that we will go on longing for a resolution that will not come, not within life as we know it anyway.
If you think about it, an enormous amount of damage is created by the myth of utopia. There is an intrinsic feeling in nearly every person that your life could be perfect if you only had such and such a car or such and such a spouse or job. We believe we will be made whole by our accomplishments, our possessions, or our social status....
I saw a story on 60 minutes a few months ago about the happiest country in the world. It was Denmark. Ruling out financial status, physical health, and even social freedom...the single charasteristic of the Danes that allowed them such contentment was this: they had low expectations.
I'm not making that up. There is something in Denmark's culture that allows them to look at life realistically. They don't expect products to fulfill them or relationships to end all their problems. p. 201-202
Growing up in church we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems. We were taught that there was a circle shaped hold in our heart and that we had tried to fill it with the square pegs of sex, drugs, and rock and roll; but only the circle peg of Jesus could fill our hole. I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hold never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie....I think Jesus can make things better, but I don't think he is going to make things perfect. not here, and not now.
What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul has hope our souls will be made complete...Paul says Jesus is the hope that will not disappoint. I find that comforting. That helps me get through the day, to be honest. It even makes me content somehow. Maybe that's what Paul meant when he said he'd learned the secret of contentment. p. 204
...as I continued to see a counselor, I realized that for years I'd thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion...it's too much pressure to put on a person. I think that's why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don't get that, they feel as though they're going to die. p. 204
....when I think back on those six weeks, what I really remember are the few times we made an extra effort to do something memorable. We took my dog Lucy for a hike and introduced her to her first waterfall. We took the kayaks out on the river and strapped them together to have a floating picnic. When we look back at our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out. p. 209
I like those scenes in the Bible where God stops people and asks them to build an altar. You'd think He was making them do that for Himself, but I don't think God really gets much from looking at a pile of rocks. Instead, I think God wanted his people to build altars for their sake, something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time they were rescued, or they were given grace. p. 214
I hated that it took pain to open the curtain revealing the man's heart, but it did and it does. We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending. p. 223
...She did not want to let on that she was weak or the end was near. Her friend softly explained the need for a show of strength was over and that she should be fully present in the reality of her story and say good-bye. p. 224
...I wondered how much it costs to be rich in friends and how many years and stories and scenes it takes to make a rich life happen. You' can't build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch, I thought to myself. p. 228
It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything. p. 231
It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a joy you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It's as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help. p. 246
One Thousand Gifts
p 110 now
To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it...to know it comes from God...
If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad." CS Lewis
It takes a full twenty minutes after your stomach is full for your brain to register satiation. How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, teh greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction.
That initial discipline, the daily game to count, keeping counting to one thousand, it was God's necessary tool to reshape me, remake me, rename me... p. 84
All that God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, light never stops shining. p. 88
"See that I am God. see that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, no ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?" Julian of Norwich.
I know eucharisteo and the miracle. But I am not a woman who ever lives the full knowing. I am a wandering Israelite who sees the flame in the sky above, the pillar, the smoke from the mountain, the earth open up and give way, and still I forget. I am beset by chronic soul amnesia. I am empty of truth and need the refilling. I need to come again every day...for who can gather the manna but once, hoarding, and store away sustenance in the mild for all of the living? p. 107
While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving. p. 176
True saints know that the place where all the joy comes from is far deeper than that of feelings; joy comes from the place of the very presence of God. Joy is God and God is joy and joy doesn't negate all other emotions--joy transcends all other emotions. p. 176
Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless. The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy--nothing else. p. 177
And what do I really deserve? Thankfully, God never gives whwat is deserved, but instead, God graciously, passionately offers gifts, our bodies, our time, our very lives. p. 178
...dying to self demands that I might gratefully and humbly receive the better, the only things that a good God gives. p. 179
This time, I know healing. Eucharisteo makes the knees the vantage point of a life and I bend and the body, it says it quiet: "Thy will be done." This is the way a body and a mouth say thank you: Thy will be done. This is the way the self dies, falls into the arms of Love. p .180
No one who ever said to God, 'Thy will be done,' and meant it with his heart, ever failed to find joy--not just in heaven, or even down the road in the future of this world, but in this world at that very moment, asserts Peter Kreeft. p. 180
Dorothy Sayers: Whenever man is made the centre of things, he becomes the storm-centre of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains... But when Christ is at the center, when dishes, laundry, work is my song of thanks to Him, joy rains....the work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness. p. 194
It is by the very function of our being, not our doing, that we are the beloved of God. p. 199
The way through the pain is to reach out to others in theirs. p. 199
He sings love over me?
What else can all these gifts mean?
Crazy, I know, but until eucharisteo had me write the graces on paper, in my own handwriting, until it alerted my mind to see the graces in the details of my very own life, I hadn't really known. p. 204
Why doubt the dare to fully live? Now and right here. Why not let all of life be penetrated by grace, gratitude, joy? This is the only way to welcome the Kingdom of God. p. 223
I still don't know why He took her. I don't know why my parents' hearts were left to weep. Though I cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has made me my truest self. p. 225
To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it...to know it comes from God...
If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad." CS Lewis
It takes a full twenty minutes after your stomach is full for your brain to register satiation. How long does it take your soul to realize that your life is full? The slower the living, teh greater the sense of fullness and satisfaction.
That initial discipline, the daily game to count, keeping counting to one thousand, it was God's necessary tool to reshape me, remake me, rename me... p. 84
All that God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, light never stops shining. p. 88
"See that I am God. see that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, no ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?" Julian of Norwich.
I know eucharisteo and the miracle. But I am not a woman who ever lives the full knowing. I am a wandering Israelite who sees the flame in the sky above, the pillar, the smoke from the mountain, the earth open up and give way, and still I forget. I am beset by chronic soul amnesia. I am empty of truth and need the refilling. I need to come again every day...for who can gather the manna but once, hoarding, and store away sustenance in the mild for all of the living? p. 107
While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things, because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving. p. 176
True saints know that the place where all the joy comes from is far deeper than that of feelings; joy comes from the place of the very presence of God. Joy is God and God is joy and joy doesn't negate all other emotions--joy transcends all other emotions. p. 176
Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless. The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy--nothing else. p. 177
And what do I really deserve? Thankfully, God never gives whwat is deserved, but instead, God graciously, passionately offers gifts, our bodies, our time, our very lives. p. 178
...dying to self demands that I might gratefully and humbly receive the better, the only things that a good God gives. p. 179
This time, I know healing. Eucharisteo makes the knees the vantage point of a life and I bend and the body, it says it quiet: "Thy will be done." This is the way a body and a mouth say thank you: Thy will be done. This is the way the self dies, falls into the arms of Love. p .180
No one who ever said to God, 'Thy will be done,' and meant it with his heart, ever failed to find joy--not just in heaven, or even down the road in the future of this world, but in this world at that very moment, asserts Peter Kreeft. p. 180
Dorothy Sayers: Whenever man is made the centre of things, he becomes the storm-centre of trouble. The moment you think of serving people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains... But when Christ is at the center, when dishes, laundry, work is my song of thanks to Him, joy rains....the work becomes worship, a liturgy of thankfulness. p. 194
It is by the very function of our being, not our doing, that we are the beloved of God. p. 199
The way through the pain is to reach out to others in theirs. p. 199
He sings love over me?
What else can all these gifts mean?
Crazy, I know, but until eucharisteo had me write the graces on paper, in my own handwriting, until it alerted my mind to see the graces in the details of my very own life, I hadn't really known. p. 204
Why doubt the dare to fully live? Now and right here. Why not let all of life be penetrated by grace, gratitude, joy? This is the only way to welcome the Kingdom of God. p. 223
I still don't know why He took her. I don't know why my parents' hearts were left to weep. Though I cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has made me my truest self. p. 225
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson
Positivity Self Test www.PositivityRatio.com
watch to see if score/ration increases
Joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
Whether it's fascination, laughter, or love, your moments of heartfelt positivity don't last long. Good feelings come and go, much like perfect weather. It's the way we humans were designed. Positivity fades. If it didn't, you'd have a hard time reacting to change. If positivity were permanent, you wouldn't notice the difference between good news and bad news, or between an invitation and an insult. p. 16
Positivity opens us. The first core truth about positive emotions is that they open our hearts and our minds, making us more receptive and more creative. p. 21
All people yearn to be happy, but many of us have been coaxed into looking for our happiness in all the wrong places. We look for happiness in higher salaries, more possessions, or higher achievements. Or we fixate on the future, holding out that "one day" our dreams will come true and make us happy. p. 29
Whereas the old story leaves people feeling guilty when they "take time" for something that makes them feel good, the new story can give people the courage to cultivate, protect, and cherish moments that touch and open their hearts. p. 30
You may have noticed that the term happiness is not in my top ten. I avoid this term because I feel it's murky and overused. Although sometimes we use the word happy to refer to heartfelt positivity (as in "seeing you smile makes me happy"), that same feeling is often better described by another, more-specific term, like joy, gratitude, or love, depending on the circumstances. p. 37
It turns out that unexplained positivity lasts longer than positivity we analyze until we fully understand it. p. 50
Simply asking yourself "What's going right for me right now?" can unlock so much...you prepare the soil for positivity to take root. p. 51
As gratitude opens your heart, it creates the urge to do something kind for the person who was kind to you. Scientists have carefully studied the downstream effects of expressing heartfelt gratitude. The evidence shows that when we share our gratitude--whether in words, kindnesses, or gifts--we fertilize our relationships, helping them grow stronger and closer. p. 92-93
...studies show that shared moments of laughter and joviality between partners deepen their relationship, making it more satisfying to both. Other studies show that couples who express high levels of positivity to each other build up important reserves that help them weather the inevitable hardships they will face. p. 93
Although any single hug--or moment of positivity--is unlikely to change your life, the slow and steady accumulation of hugs--or positivity--makes a huge difference. So find a way to increase your daily dose of genuine, heart to heart, ahng on tight hugs. You will not only give and receive good feelings, but over time, you'll give and receive good health. p. 95
Whether we seek it or not, negativity has a way of finding us. Even when we jump our higest, we most often find ourselves closer to the floor than to the ceiling in the gymnasium of life.
As is true in many relams of life, more is not always better. Problems may well occur with too much positivity. Yet I see a more usuful lesson hidden in the upper limit to flourishing: negativity is also a necessary ingredient in the recipe for a flourishing life. Go figure...
...knowing that positivity is life-giving doesn't mean that negativity needs to be forever banished. It can't be. Life gives us plenty of reasons to be afraid, angry, sad, and then some. Without negativity you become Polyanna, with a forced clown smile painted on your faic. you lose touch with reality. you're not genuine. p. 136
I've come to see the ration of positivity to negativity as the uncanny balance between levity and gravity. Levity is that unseen force that lifts you skyward, whereas gravity is the opposing force that pulls you earthward. Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery. yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant, dynamic, realistic... Appropriate negativity delivers the promise of gravity. It grounds you in reality. Heartfelt positivity, by contrast, provides the lift that makes you buoyant and ready to flourish. p. 137
Decrease Negativity
Bear in mind that the goal is to reduce your negativity, not eliminate it. At times, negative emotions are appropriate and useful. It is proper and helpful, for instance, to mourn after a loss, to resonate on your anger to figut an injustice, or to be frightened by things that could cause harm...
Your best goal is to reduce inappropriate or gratuitous negativity. Whereas some of your negativity is corrective and energizing, not all of it is. Gratuitous negativity is neither helpful nor healthy. At times your entrenched emotional habits can intensify or prolong your bad feelings far beyond their usefulness. Your negativity become corrosive and smothering. Like an out-of-control week, gratuitous negativity grows fast and crowds out positivity's more tender shoots. p. 158-159
Increase Positivity:
Heartfelt: To truly feel positivity in your heart requires that you slow donw. The pace of modern life is often so relentless that it keeps you focused outward, away from your inner core. Over time, this stance numbs your heart. To increase your positivity you'll need to "un-numb" your heart. Let it feel. Let it be open. Slow yourself down enough that you can see and hear and sense with your heart, not just with your eyes, ears and mind. Let yourself breathe in and fully absorb the goodness that surrounds you. Connect to that goodness. Revel in it. p. 180
Positivity Toolkit
Portfolios--let them evolve, update them, rotate them, only keep one on "display." Engage with each item deeply but with a light touch.
Tune in to kindness--your own and that of others. Seek out and savor all manner of goodness, beauty, and excellence. Treasure these moments and you'll unlock recurrent waves of gratitude, awe, inspiration, and more. Become like a plant and turn toward the light, in all its spiritual, earthly, and human forms. Feed on it. The more you train your eye, mind, and heart to the positivity in your life, the more of it you'll find. Remember that the intensity of your positivity matters far less than its relative frequency. This means that even more positivity, experienced often, can lead you to your higher ground.
watch to see if score/ration increases
Joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
Whether it's fascination, laughter, or love, your moments of heartfelt positivity don't last long. Good feelings come and go, much like perfect weather. It's the way we humans were designed. Positivity fades. If it didn't, you'd have a hard time reacting to change. If positivity were permanent, you wouldn't notice the difference between good news and bad news, or between an invitation and an insult. p. 16
Positivity opens us. The first core truth about positive emotions is that they open our hearts and our minds, making us more receptive and more creative. p. 21
All people yearn to be happy, but many of us have been coaxed into looking for our happiness in all the wrong places. We look for happiness in higher salaries, more possessions, or higher achievements. Or we fixate on the future, holding out that "one day" our dreams will come true and make us happy. p. 29
Whereas the old story leaves people feeling guilty when they "take time" for something that makes them feel good, the new story can give people the courage to cultivate, protect, and cherish moments that touch and open their hearts. p. 30
You may have noticed that the term happiness is not in my top ten. I avoid this term because I feel it's murky and overused. Although sometimes we use the word happy to refer to heartfelt positivity (as in "seeing you smile makes me happy"), that same feeling is often better described by another, more-specific term, like joy, gratitude, or love, depending on the circumstances. p. 37
It turns out that unexplained positivity lasts longer than positivity we analyze until we fully understand it. p. 50
Simply asking yourself "What's going right for me right now?" can unlock so much...you prepare the soil for positivity to take root. p. 51
As gratitude opens your heart, it creates the urge to do something kind for the person who was kind to you. Scientists have carefully studied the downstream effects of expressing heartfelt gratitude. The evidence shows that when we share our gratitude--whether in words, kindnesses, or gifts--we fertilize our relationships, helping them grow stronger and closer. p. 92-93
...studies show that shared moments of laughter and joviality between partners deepen their relationship, making it more satisfying to both. Other studies show that couples who express high levels of positivity to each other build up important reserves that help them weather the inevitable hardships they will face. p. 93
Although any single hug--or moment of positivity--is unlikely to change your life, the slow and steady accumulation of hugs--or positivity--makes a huge difference. So find a way to increase your daily dose of genuine, heart to heart, ahng on tight hugs. You will not only give and receive good feelings, but over time, you'll give and receive good health. p. 95
Whether we seek it or not, negativity has a way of finding us. Even when we jump our higest, we most often find ourselves closer to the floor than to the ceiling in the gymnasium of life.
As is true in many relams of life, more is not always better. Problems may well occur with too much positivity. Yet I see a more usuful lesson hidden in the upper limit to flourishing: negativity is also a necessary ingredient in the recipe for a flourishing life. Go figure...
...knowing that positivity is life-giving doesn't mean that negativity needs to be forever banished. It can't be. Life gives us plenty of reasons to be afraid, angry, sad, and then some. Without negativity you become Polyanna, with a forced clown smile painted on your faic. you lose touch with reality. you're not genuine. p. 136
I've come to see the ration of positivity to negativity as the uncanny balance between levity and gravity. Levity is that unseen force that lifts you skyward, whereas gravity is the opposing force that pulls you earthward. Unchecked levity leaves you flighty, ungrounded, and unreal. Unchecked gravity leaves you collapsed in a heap of misery. yet when properly combined, these two opposing forces leave you buoyant, dynamic, realistic... Appropriate negativity delivers the promise of gravity. It grounds you in reality. Heartfelt positivity, by contrast, provides the lift that makes you buoyant and ready to flourish. p. 137
Decrease Negativity
Bear in mind that the goal is to reduce your negativity, not eliminate it. At times, negative emotions are appropriate and useful. It is proper and helpful, for instance, to mourn after a loss, to resonate on your anger to figut an injustice, or to be frightened by things that could cause harm...
Your best goal is to reduce inappropriate or gratuitous negativity. Whereas some of your negativity is corrective and energizing, not all of it is. Gratuitous negativity is neither helpful nor healthy. At times your entrenched emotional habits can intensify or prolong your bad feelings far beyond their usefulness. Your negativity become corrosive and smothering. Like an out-of-control week, gratuitous negativity grows fast and crowds out positivity's more tender shoots. p. 158-159
- Dispute negative thinking; examine facts, compare them to the negative thinking
- Break the grip of rumination: Our minds are often high traffic places--it's easy to go to a bad place over and over again in your mind. You examine negative thoughts from every angle, question them, and don't get anywhere. You are stuck in a rut of endless questions. Break this cycle by being aware, distract yourself, find a way to lift your mood.
- Become more mindful: Negative thoughts inevitably arise. Attempting to block out negative thoughts and emotions backfires. Instead, pay attention to your own inner experience with full awareness and without judgement. Accept a thought as just a thought--simply an occurrence in your mind that arises, takes shape, and passes, then soon dissipates.
- Defuse your negativity landmines: Reflect on typical daily routine and ask which circumstances usher in the most negativity. Ask--is this necessary? Is it gratuitous? Is it both? Necessary negativity faces facts and moves us forward. Gratuitous negativity doesn't lead anywhere good. It is identified by it's sheer size relative to the circumstances at hand. It's excessive, redundant, ugly--blown up all out of proportion. If you can't avoid a situation that brings you needless negativity, you have at least three options for curbing it: you can modify the situation, you can attend to different aspects of the situation, or you can change it's meaning.
- Assess your Media Diet
- Find substitutes for gossip and sarcasm: if gossip or sarcastic humor is habitual for you, consider whether you are needlessly shackling your own positivity ration and also bringing those around you down. If this is you, challenge yourself to find substitutes. When you talk about others, highlight their positive qualities and good fortunes, not their weaknesses and mishaps. When you want to poke fun, poke fun lightly. Hurl puns, not barbs. Avoid hidden forms of verbal aggression...
Increase Positivity:
Heartfelt: To truly feel positivity in your heart requires that you slow donw. The pace of modern life is often so relentless that it keeps you focused outward, away from your inner core. Over time, this stance numbs your heart. To increase your positivity you'll need to "un-numb" your heart. Let it feel. Let it be open. Slow yourself down enough that you can see and hear and sense with your heart, not just with your eyes, ears and mind. Let yourself breathe in and fully absorb the goodness that surrounds you. Connect to that goodness. Revel in it. p. 180
- Find positive meaning: how do you interpret the circumstances? What about big meaning? How about the meaning of life itself? What sense do you make of your life as a whole? What story do you tell yourself about why your life has gone the way it has? Does the story energize you or hold you down?
- Savor goodness: Think about goodness in a way that pumps it up--before it think "it's going to be fabulous", during think "I just want to drink this all in," after it replay in your mind. This is NOT analysis, and requires a light mental touch. Dissecting deflates positivity. Do things to pay more attention to positive experiences.
- Count your blessings: Count only a few days out of the week rather than every day.
- Kindness counts: be intentionally kind to others--preferably several large acts of kindness on a single day rather than spread out.
- Follow your passions
- Dream about your future
- Apply your strengths: the boost in positivity that comes from learning your strengths is significant but temporary. By contrast, the boost in positivity that comes from finding new ways to apply your strengths is significant and lasting.
- Connect with others: Connect with others, every day, and no matter what. And even if you're not a naturally outgoing person, act like you are. Scientific experiements document that if you simply pretend to be extroverted when you're with others--if you act bold, talkative, energetic, active, assertive, and adventerous--no matter what your natural inclinations are, you'll extract more positivity from those exhanges. My own open heart study suggests that you don't particularly need to be or act outgoing; cultivating loving concern for others seems to be enough. People who made regular efforts to cultivate such tenderness and compassion pulled more positivity out of their ordinary exchanges with others than those that didn't. I encourage you to experiment with putting on extroversion or loving concern for others. See what new sources of positivity spring forth. My prediction is that when you're with others you'll smile more, laugh more, enjoy greater positivity, and all the while build deeper and more satisfying connections...
- Connect with nature: increases positivity and memory, but only in spring and early summer
- Open your mind--practice mindfulness, be open to goodness, practice acceptance not analysis of the good that comes your way.
- Open your heart--loving kindness meditation--find warm and tender feelings, direct them towards yourself then to a widening circle of others.
Positivity Toolkit
- Be open--experiment with mindful awareness, temporarily rid your mind of expectations and judgments. Give yourself permission and time to experience the richness of the present moment. Being open means cultivating curiosity about and acceptance of whatever you're experiencing. Dont' try to suppress any thoughts or feelings, just acknowledge and allow them to pass. It is what it is.
- Create High Quality Connections--even where none existed before using one or more of these ways: Be present, attentive, and affirming, Support what the other person is doing, Trust and let it show, Play.
- Cultivate Kindness: Give yourself the goal of performing 5 new acts of kindness on a single day, something that makes a difference and comes at some cost. Try once a week or once a month.
- Develop Distractions--which are important tools for breaking the grip of rumination and curb needless negativity. Effective distractions demand full attention. Make 2 lists--healthy distractions, unhealthy distractions. For each unhealthy distraction come up with a healthy alternative. Figure out resources necessary for healthy distractions.
- Dispute negative thinking: Write down common negative thoughts, shuffle and dispute each one loudly and with conviction. Add new gratuitous negativities to deck of thoughts.
- Find nearby nature
- Learn and apply your strengths---online survey @ AuthenticHappiness.com, Reflect on which truly resonate and halp you come alive. These are signature strengths. Google Reflected Best Self Exercise. Once you've learned your strengths, redesign life to use them every day.
- Meditate Mindfully--see if you begin to see thoughts arising, describe them neutrally. Observe why it is alluring. Try to stay in the present. No need to suppress thoughts, just start again.
- Loving-kindness meditation: May I/he be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.
- Ritualize Gratitude--notice the gifts that surround you. Record in journal, silently offer thanks for parts of daily routine.
- Savor positivity--past, present, or future. Really think about it in a away that cherishes the event.
- Visualize your future.
Tune in to kindness--your own and that of others. Seek out and savor all manner of goodness, beauty, and excellence. Treasure these moments and you'll unlock recurrent waves of gratitude, awe, inspiration, and more. Become like a plant and turn toward the light, in all its spiritual, earthly, and human forms. Feed on it. The more you train your eye, mind, and heart to the positivity in your life, the more of it you'll find. Remember that the intensity of your positivity matters far less than its relative frequency. This means that even more positivity, experienced often, can lead you to your higher ground.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Happiness is a Choice by Barry Kaufman
(Not a book that did a great job of explaining why/how happiness is a choice.)
1. make happiness THE priority
2. personal authenticity
-sharing ourselves without masks or filters
-freedom to be me
3. let go of judgements
-about people and limits
we really don't know
4. Be present
know that pain won't last much longer
5. Be grateful
1. make happiness THE priority
2. personal authenticity
-sharing ourselves without masks or filters
-freedom to be me
3. let go of judgements
-about people and limits
we really don't know
4. Be present
know that pain won't last much longer
5. Be grateful
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Help Thanks Wow by Anne Lamott
We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, "Hello? Is athere anyone there?" We can pray, "Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?" We can say anything to God. It's all prayer.
Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy--all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toard something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Was my prayers answered? Yes, although I didn't get what I'd hoped and prayed for, what I'd selected from the menu. p. 30
There are a lot of prayers in the world, some of them better known than others. The serenity prayer is one of the most famous institutionalized prayers of the world, a greatest hits of prayer. The best known version says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference...A sober friend once said that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much. p. 31
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people's lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I acept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am.
Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon--say two-ish?
Thank You in advacnce for Your company and blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.
p. 34
It is easy to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it's harder than we would like. It's a package deal, though...
We and life are spectacularly flawed and complex. Often we do not get our way, which I hate, hate, hate. But in my saner moments I remember that if we did, usually we would shortchange ourselves... p. 45
Most of us figure out by a certain age--some of us later than others--that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don't have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the complaints department. But if you've been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
I admit, sometimes this position of gratitude can be a bit of a stretch. So many bad things happen in each of our lives. Who knew? ...We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It's all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it's all part of the big picture. p. 50-51
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
The marvel is only partly that somehow you lured them into your web twenty years ago, forty years ago, and they totally stuck with you. The more astonishing thing is that these greatest of all possible people feel the same way about you--horrible, grim, self-obsessed you. They say--or maybe I said--that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks that he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you. p. 56-58
"Thanks" is a huge min-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interestedin our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humnbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable.... p. 60
....Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth...
We can't will ourselves to be more generous and accepting. Most of us are more like the townspeople of Shirley Jackson's "the Lottery" than we are like the Dalai Lama. I know I am. And this is what hell is like.
It obviously behooves me to practice being receptive, open for the business of gratitude.
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
I have found that I even have to pray for the willingness to give up the stuff I hate most about myself. I have to ask for help, and sometimes beg. That's the human condition. I just love my own guck so much. Help. then I try to be a good person, a better person than I was yesterday, or an hour ago. In general, the 10 Commandments are not a bad place to start, nor is the Golden Rule. We try not to lie so much or kill anyone that day. We do the footwork, which comes down mostly to paying attention and trying not to be such a jerk. We try not to feel and act so entitled. We let others go first. p. 62-64
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace. Maybe you won't always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. p. 65
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That's why they call it breathtaking. p. 81
Gorgeous, amazing things things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible... p. 85
God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say "I have HAD it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometiems quickly, but usually slowly. p. 85-86
The tide comes in and sweeps out our children's castles, and it hurts so much, and a wave knocks our father over, and he injures his back; he'll never be the same. We pray to be of solace, and to find the courage to let people have their feelings. We breathe and pray to stay silent while people find their own way through. (Well, we try.) We pray to stay calm when the earth shakes and explodes. The universe is always having spasms and eruptions. it's labor. that's how things get born. We rush in to help.
I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overract and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense of humor back. That we and those we love have lightened up over the years is one of the most astonishing sights we will ever witness. p. 95
"Late Fragment"
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me." C. S. Lewis p. 100
More than anything, prayer helps me get my sense of humor back. It brings me back to my heart, from the treacherous swamp of my mind. It brings me back to the now, to the holy moment... p. 100
You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and--hardest of all, at least to me--learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to teh very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.
Those are the basic instructions, to which I can add only: Amen.
Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy--all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toard something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Was my prayers answered? Yes, although I didn't get what I'd hoped and prayed for, what I'd selected from the menu. p. 30
There are a lot of prayers in the world, some of them better known than others. The serenity prayer is one of the most famous institutionalized prayers of the world, a greatest hits of prayer. The best known version says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference...A sober friend once said that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much. p. 31
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people's lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I acept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am.
Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon--say two-ish?
Thank You in advacnce for Your company and blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.
p. 34
It is easy to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it's harder than we would like. It's a package deal, though...
We and life are spectacularly flawed and complex. Often we do not get our way, which I hate, hate, hate. But in my saner moments I remember that if we did, usually we would shortchange ourselves... p. 45
Most of us figure out by a certain age--some of us later than others--that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don't have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the complaints department. But if you've been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
I admit, sometimes this position of gratitude can be a bit of a stretch. So many bad things happen in each of our lives. Who knew? ...We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It's all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it's all part of the big picture. p. 50-51
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
The marvel is only partly that somehow you lured them into your web twenty years ago, forty years ago, and they totally stuck with you. The more astonishing thing is that these greatest of all possible people feel the same way about you--horrible, grim, self-obsessed you. They say--or maybe I said--that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks that he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you. p. 56-58
"Thanks" is a huge min-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interestedin our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humnbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable.... p. 60
....Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth...
We can't will ourselves to be more generous and accepting. Most of us are more like the townspeople of Shirley Jackson's "the Lottery" than we are like the Dalai Lama. I know I am. And this is what hell is like.
It obviously behooves me to practice being receptive, open for the business of gratitude.
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
I have found that I even have to pray for the willingness to give up the stuff I hate most about myself. I have to ask for help, and sometimes beg. That's the human condition. I just love my own guck so much. Help. then I try to be a good person, a better person than I was yesterday, or an hour ago. In general, the 10 Commandments are not a bad place to start, nor is the Golden Rule. We try not to lie so much or kill anyone that day. We do the footwork, which comes down mostly to paying attention and trying not to be such a jerk. We try not to feel and act so entitled. We let others go first. p. 62-64
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace. Maybe you won't always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. p. 65
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That's why they call it breathtaking. p. 81
Gorgeous, amazing things things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible... p. 85
God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say "I have HAD it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometiems quickly, but usually slowly. p. 85-86
The tide comes in and sweeps out our children's castles, and it hurts so much, and a wave knocks our father over, and he injures his back; he'll never be the same. We pray to be of solace, and to find the courage to let people have their feelings. We breathe and pray to stay silent while people find their own way through. (Well, we try.) We pray to stay calm when the earth shakes and explodes. The universe is always having spasms and eruptions. it's labor. that's how things get born. We rush in to help.
I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overract and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense of humor back. That we and those we love have lightened up over the years is one of the most astonishing sights we will ever witness. p. 95
"Late Fragment"
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me." C. S. Lewis p. 100
More than anything, prayer helps me get my sense of humor back. It brings me back to my heart, from the treacherous swamp of my mind. It brings me back to the now, to the holy moment... p. 100
You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and--hardest of all, at least to me--learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to teh very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.
Those are the basic instructions, to which I can add only: Amen.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)
The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of it's cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we, personally, do not have any. In a sense, dissonance theory is a theory of blind spots--of how and why people unintentionally blind themselves so that they fail to notice vital events and information that might make them question their behavior or their convictions. Along with the confirmation bias, the brain comes packaged with other self-serving habits that allow us to justify our own perceptions and beliefs as being accurate, realistic, and unbiased. Social psychologist Lee Ross calls this phenomenon "naive realism," the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, "as they really are." We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren't seeing things clearly. Naive realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are openminded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion. And two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren't, I wouldn't hold it. p. 42
Ross and his colleagues have found that we believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are really thinking. And when we introspect, looking into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. p. 43
Of course, many of us intentionally avoid a painful memory by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about it; and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling a painful memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval cues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory.
Psychodynamic therapists, however, complain that repression is entirely different from the normal mechanisms of forgetting and recall...Yet in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: the memories keep intruding.
...."Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated," says McNally. "The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible." p. 111-112
...happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they either talk and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it." p. 166
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.
We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters...in those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am."
....."I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws."
p. 166 & 167
...three possible ways out of the emotional impasse. [in work with married couples in which one had deeply hurt or betrayed the other] In the first, the perpetrator unilaterally puts aside his or her own feelings and, realizing that the victim's anger masks enormous suffering, responds to that suffering with genuine remorse and apology. In the second, the victim unilaterally lets go of his or her repeated, angry accusations--after all, the point has been made--and expresses pain rather than anger, a response that may make the perpetrator more empathic and caring rather than defensive. Either one of these actions, if taken unilaterally, is difficult and for many people impossible. The third way...is the hardest but most hopeful for a long-term resolution of the conflict: both sides drop their self-justifications and agree on steps they can take together to move forward. p. 210
...For his part, [Nelson] Mandela could have allowed his anger to consume him; he could have emerged from that prison with a determination to take revenge that many would have found entirely legitimate. Instead he relinquished anger for the sake of the goal to which he had devoted his life. "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy," said Mandela. "Then he becomes your partner."
Virtually the first act of the new democracy was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The goal of the TRC was to give victims of brutality a forum where their accounts would be heard and vindicated, where their dignity and sense of justice would be restored, and where they could express their grievances in front of the perpetrators themselves. In exchanged for amnesty the perpetrators had to drop their denials, evasions, and self-justifications and admit the harm that they had done, including torture and murder. The commission emphasized the "need for understanding but not for vengence, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [humanity towards others] but not for victimization." p. 211
A wise man once said "an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." p. 218
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu ~500BC
Ross and his colleagues have found that we believe our own judgments are less biased and more independent than those of others partly because we rely on introspection to tell us what we are thinking and feeling, but we have no way of knowing what others are really thinking. And when we introspect, looking into our souls and hearts, the need to avoid dissonance assures us that we have only the best and most honorable of motives. p. 43
Of course, many of us intentionally avoid a painful memory by distracting ourselves or trying not to think about it; and many of us have had the experience of suddenly recalling a painful memory, one we thought long gone, when we are in a situation that evokes it. The situation provides what memory scientists call retrieval cues, familiar signals that reawaken the memory.
Psychodynamic therapists, however, complain that repression is entirely different from the normal mechanisms of forgetting and recall...Yet in his meticulous review of the experimental research and the clinical evidence, presented in his book Remembering Trauma, clinical psychologist Richard McNally concluded: The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support. Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: the memories keep intruding.
...."Truly traumatic events--terrifying, life-threatening experiences--are never forgotten, let alone if they are repeated," says McNally. "The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible." p. 111-112
...happy couples know how to manage their conflicts. If a problem is annoying them, they either talk and fix the problem, let it go, or learn to live with it." p. 166
From our standpoint, therefore, misunderstandings, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.
We are not referring here to the garden-variety kind of self-justification that we are all inclined to use when we make a mistake or disagree about relatively trivial matters...in those circumstances, self-justification momentarily protects us from feeling clumsy, incompetent, or forgetful. The kind that can erode a marriage, however, reflects a more serious effort to protect not what we did but who we are, and it comes in two versions: "I'm right and you're wrong" and "Even if I'm wrong, too bad; that's the way I am."
....."I am the right kind of person and you are the wrong kind of person. And because you are the wrong kind of person, you cannot appreciate my virtues; foolishly, you even think some of my virtues are flaws."
p. 166 & 167
...three possible ways out of the emotional impasse. [in work with married couples in which one had deeply hurt or betrayed the other] In the first, the perpetrator unilaterally puts aside his or her own feelings and, realizing that the victim's anger masks enormous suffering, responds to that suffering with genuine remorse and apology. In the second, the victim unilaterally lets go of his or her repeated, angry accusations--after all, the point has been made--and expresses pain rather than anger, a response that may make the perpetrator more empathic and caring rather than defensive. Either one of these actions, if taken unilaterally, is difficult and for many people impossible. The third way...is the hardest but most hopeful for a long-term resolution of the conflict: both sides drop their self-justifications and agree on steps they can take together to move forward. p. 210
...For his part, [Nelson] Mandela could have allowed his anger to consume him; he could have emerged from that prison with a determination to take revenge that many would have found entirely legitimate. Instead he relinquished anger for the sake of the goal to which he had devoted his life. "If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy," said Mandela. "Then he becomes your partner."
Virtually the first act of the new democracy was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The goal of the TRC was to give victims of brutality a forum where their accounts would be heard and vindicated, where their dignity and sense of justice would be restored, and where they could express their grievances in front of the perpetrators themselves. In exchanged for amnesty the perpetrators had to drop their denials, evasions, and self-justifications and admit the harm that they had done, including torture and murder. The commission emphasized the "need for understanding but not for vengence, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu [humanity towards others] but not for victimization." p. 211
A wise man once said "an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." p. 218
A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.
Lao Tzu ~500BC
Friday, May 31, 2013
Carry On, Warrior
When you start to feel, do. When you start to feel scared because you don't have enough money, find someone to offer a little money. When you start to feel like you don't have enough love, find someone to offer love. When you feel unappreciated and unacknowledged, appreciate and acknowledge someone else in a concrete way. When you feel unlucky, order yourself to consider a blessing or two. Then find a tangible way to make today somebody else's lucky day. Thesestrategies help me sidestep wallowing every day. p. 30
Here's what I learned in the wake of my Lyme news: it's really hard to distinguish between a chute and a ladder. The days following my diagnosis were filled with little miracles. Maybe all my days are filled with little miracles, but I'm too distracted by what I think is my life to notice them. Sometimes bad news is the best way to see all the good quickly and clearly. Bad news has a way of waking us up, sort of like a glass of cold water in the face. We might prefer waking in a gentler way, but we can't argue with the efficiency of the cold water method... p. 37
My mother was equally devastated--so devastated, in fact, that it was hard for her to let it be as awful as it was. She was hopeful. She had to be, because allowing it to really sink in, accepting that there was no way out of the pain that her baby girl was going through, no matter how much "hope" we directed her way, was unfathomable. So she said things that occasionally made Sister feel that she was being pushed through her grief too fast.
I learned that in these disasters, all we can do is tell our ____ that their grief is real, and if it lasts forever, then we will grieve with them forever.
As far as I was able to tell during those two years, there was nothing else worth saying. It was not going to be all right, ever. Everything doesn't happen for a decent reason. I couldn't do anything at all except feed her, hold her when she cried, pray angry prayers, keep showing up, and hope that time and my home and presence would offer healing. p. 43
If...you are called upon, keep being who you have always been. Do what you've always done. There is a reason your friend chose you for that rose, so don't freeze. Keep moving. Trust your instincts.
Go to her. Don't call first, because she won't know she wants you there untill you arrive and sit down. Don't ask, "What can I do?" She doesn't know. Just do something. When you go to her house bring a movie in case she doesn't want to talk. If she does want to talk, avoid saying things to diminish or explain away her pain, like, "Everything happens for a reason," or "Time heals all wounds," or "God gives us only what we can handle." These are things people say when they don't know what else to say, and even if they're true, they're better left unsaid because they can be discovered only in retrospect. When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. They are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate. Offer your presence, your love, yourself, so she'll understand that no matter how dark it gets, she's not walking alone. That is always enough to offer, Thank God.
Grief is not something to be fixed. It's something to be borne, together. And when the time is right, there is always something that is born from it. After real grief, we are reborn as people with wider and deeper vision and greater compassion for the pain of others. We know that. So through our friend's grief, we maintain in our hearts the hope that in the end, good will come of it. But we don't say that to our friend. We let our friend discover that on her own. hope is a door each one must open for herself... p. 49-50
We're not often permitted to tell the truth in everyday life. There is a small set of words and reactions and pleasantries we are allowed to say, like, "I'm fine, and you"? But we are not supposed to say much of anything else, especially how we are really doing. We find out early that telling the wole truth makes people uncomfortalbe and is certainly not ladylike or liketly ot make us popular, so we learn to lie sweetly so we can be loved. And when we figure out this system, we are split in two: the public self, who says the right things in order to belong, and the secret self, who thinks other things. p. 51
Happiness is low expectations paired with a short-term memory problem. p. 72
Repentance is a fancy word used often in Christian circles. I don't use fancy religious words, because I don't think they explain themselves well. Also, fancy language tends to make in people feel more in and out people feel more out, and I don't think that's how words are best used. Words are best used to describe specific feelings, ideas, and hearts as clearly as possible, to make the speaker and the listener, or the writer adn the reader, feel less alone and more hopeful.
I used to be annoyed and threatened by the word repentance, until I figured out what it really means to me. Repentance is the magical moment when a sliver of light finds it's way into a place of darkness in my heart, and I'm able to see clearly how my jerkiness is keeping me from peace and joy in a specific area of my life.
I don't believe in advice. Everybody has the asnwers right inside her, since we're all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, "I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that. Offering love usually looks like being quiet, listening hard, and letting my friend talk until she discovers that she already has the answers. p. 117
Forgive yourself.
It's not a once-and-for-all thing, self-forgiveness. It's more like a constant attitude. It's just being hopeful. It's refusing to hold your breath. It's loving yourself enough to offer yourself a million more tries. It's what we want our kids to do every day for their whole lives, right? We want them to embrace being human instead of fighting against it. We want them to offer themselves grace. Forgiveness and grace are like oxygen: we can't offer it to others unless we put on our masks first. We have to put our grace masks on and breathe in deep. We have to show them how it's done. We need to love ourselves if we want our kids to love themselves. We don't necessarily have to love them more; we have to love ourselves more. We have to be gentle with ourselves. We have to forgive ourselves and then...oh my goodness...find ourselves sort of awesome, actually... p. 118-119
I wanted to badly to tell Chase that it was ok, that we would replace Jacob with a new fish, a bigger fish, a whole school of fish, but I didn't. This was his first experience with death, and I wouldn't suggest to him that death can be cheated through replacement. I wouldn't teach him that pain should be avoided, dodged, or danced around. He needed to learn that death is worthy of grief because it's final, for now. p. 146
When he asked me, Why Mom? Why does God send us here, where things hurt so much? Why does he make us love things that he knows we're going to lose? I told him that we don't love people and animals because we will have them forever; we love them because loving them changes us, makes us better, healthier, kinder, realer. Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us. And that's what we're here to do. God sends us here to learn how to be better lovers, and to learn how to be loved, so we'll be prepared for heaven.
The only thing [your] gift needs to do is bring you joy. You must find the thing that brings you joy in the doing of that thing, and not worry about the outcome. Your gift might be crucial and obviously helpful...or it might be odd and unique.
...You will know your gift because it will bring you joy and satisfaction, even if it's hard for you to do. You will go about using your gift quietly, and eventually someone might notice and ask you to hare your gift. If you agree to share, your gift will become a bridge...I think it's pretty hard to keep a gift from becoming a bridge, somehow, someday, someway--if we use it. Because I think God must really want us to connect with each other. He must want us to become a part of each other's lives and memories, and he must want our hearts to get all tangled up with other hearts. We are each an island, but he gives us gifts to use as bridges into each other's lives. When we lay down our gift, we walk right over it and straight into another heart. p. 210-211
...I learned to just let feelings be--because eventually they pass. I learned that all thigns pass; that life is hard to endure but not impossible. I discovered that after enduring, if you choose not to run away, there are prizes. Those prizes are wisdom and dignity. I learned that Love and I, We could do hard things. p. 250
Here's what I learned in the wake of my Lyme news: it's really hard to distinguish between a chute and a ladder. The days following my diagnosis were filled with little miracles. Maybe all my days are filled with little miracles, but I'm too distracted by what I think is my life to notice them. Sometimes bad news is the best way to see all the good quickly and clearly. Bad news has a way of waking us up, sort of like a glass of cold water in the face. We might prefer waking in a gentler way, but we can't argue with the efficiency of the cold water method... p. 37
My mother was equally devastated--so devastated, in fact, that it was hard for her to let it be as awful as it was. She was hopeful. She had to be, because allowing it to really sink in, accepting that there was no way out of the pain that her baby girl was going through, no matter how much "hope" we directed her way, was unfathomable. So she said things that occasionally made Sister feel that she was being pushed through her grief too fast.
I learned that in these disasters, all we can do is tell our ____ that their grief is real, and if it lasts forever, then we will grieve with them forever.
As far as I was able to tell during those two years, there was nothing else worth saying. It was not going to be all right, ever. Everything doesn't happen for a decent reason. I couldn't do anything at all except feed her, hold her when she cried, pray angry prayers, keep showing up, and hope that time and my home and presence would offer healing. p. 43
If...you are called upon, keep being who you have always been. Do what you've always done. There is a reason your friend chose you for that rose, so don't freeze. Keep moving. Trust your instincts.
Go to her. Don't call first, because she won't know she wants you there untill you arrive and sit down. Don't ask, "What can I do?" She doesn't know. Just do something. When you go to her house bring a movie in case she doesn't want to talk. If she does want to talk, avoid saying things to diminish or explain away her pain, like, "Everything happens for a reason," or "Time heals all wounds," or "God gives us only what we can handle." These are things people say when they don't know what else to say, and even if they're true, they're better left unsaid because they can be discovered only in retrospect. When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. They are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate. Offer your presence, your love, yourself, so she'll understand that no matter how dark it gets, she's not walking alone. That is always enough to offer, Thank God.
Grief is not something to be fixed. It's something to be borne, together. And when the time is right, there is always something that is born from it. After real grief, we are reborn as people with wider and deeper vision and greater compassion for the pain of others. We know that. So through our friend's grief, we maintain in our hearts the hope that in the end, good will come of it. But we don't say that to our friend. We let our friend discover that on her own. hope is a door each one must open for herself... p. 49-50
We're not often permitted to tell the truth in everyday life. There is a small set of words and reactions and pleasantries we are allowed to say, like, "I'm fine, and you"? But we are not supposed to say much of anything else, especially how we are really doing. We find out early that telling the wole truth makes people uncomfortalbe and is certainly not ladylike or liketly ot make us popular, so we learn to lie sweetly so we can be loved. And when we figure out this system, we are split in two: the public self, who says the right things in order to belong, and the secret self, who thinks other things. p. 51
Happiness is low expectations paired with a short-term memory problem. p. 72
Repentance is a fancy word used often in Christian circles. I don't use fancy religious words, because I don't think they explain themselves well. Also, fancy language tends to make in people feel more in and out people feel more out, and I don't think that's how words are best used. Words are best used to describe specific feelings, ideas, and hearts as clearly as possible, to make the speaker and the listener, or the writer adn the reader, feel less alone and more hopeful.
I used to be annoyed and threatened by the word repentance, until I figured out what it really means to me. Repentance is the magical moment when a sliver of light finds it's way into a place of darkness in my heart, and I'm able to see clearly how my jerkiness is keeping me from peace and joy in a specific area of my life.
I don't believe in advice. Everybody has the asnwers right inside her, since we're all made up of the same amount of God. So when a friend says, "I need some advice, I switch it to, I need some love, and I try to offer that. Offering love usually looks like being quiet, listening hard, and letting my friend talk until she discovers that she already has the answers. p. 117
Forgive yourself.
It's not a once-and-for-all thing, self-forgiveness. It's more like a constant attitude. It's just being hopeful. It's refusing to hold your breath. It's loving yourself enough to offer yourself a million more tries. It's what we want our kids to do every day for their whole lives, right? We want them to embrace being human instead of fighting against it. We want them to offer themselves grace. Forgiveness and grace are like oxygen: we can't offer it to others unless we put on our masks first. We have to put our grace masks on and breathe in deep. We have to show them how it's done. We need to love ourselves if we want our kids to love themselves. We don't necessarily have to love them more; we have to love ourselves more. We have to be gentle with ourselves. We have to forgive ourselves and then...oh my goodness...find ourselves sort of awesome, actually... p. 118-119
I wanted to badly to tell Chase that it was ok, that we would replace Jacob with a new fish, a bigger fish, a whole school of fish, but I didn't. This was his first experience with death, and I wouldn't suggest to him that death can be cheated through replacement. I wouldn't teach him that pain should be avoided, dodged, or danced around. He needed to learn that death is worthy of grief because it's final, for now. p. 146
When he asked me, Why Mom? Why does God send us here, where things hurt so much? Why does he make us love things that he knows we're going to lose? I told him that we don't love people and animals because we will have them forever; we love them because loving them changes us, makes us better, healthier, kinder, realer. Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us. And that's what we're here to do. God sends us here to learn how to be better lovers, and to learn how to be loved, so we'll be prepared for heaven.
The only thing [your] gift needs to do is bring you joy. You must find the thing that brings you joy in the doing of that thing, and not worry about the outcome. Your gift might be crucial and obviously helpful...or it might be odd and unique.
...You will know your gift because it will bring you joy and satisfaction, even if it's hard for you to do. You will go about using your gift quietly, and eventually someone might notice and ask you to hare your gift. If you agree to share, your gift will become a bridge...I think it's pretty hard to keep a gift from becoming a bridge, somehow, someday, someway--if we use it. Because I think God must really want us to connect with each other. He must want us to become a part of each other's lives and memories, and he must want our hearts to get all tangled up with other hearts. We are each an island, but he gives us gifts to use as bridges into each other's lives. When we lay down our gift, we walk right over it and straight into another heart. p. 210-211
...I learned to just let feelings be--because eventually they pass. I learned that all thigns pass; that life is hard to endure but not impossible. I discovered that after enduring, if you choose not to run away, there are prizes. Those prizes are wisdom and dignity. I learned that Love and I, We could do hard things. p. 250
Monday, April 22, 2013
Nerve: Poise under pressure, serenity under stress, and the brve new science of fear and cool
by Taylor Clark
The most legendary hypochondriac in history, though, was the poet Sara Teasdale, who even employed her own full-time nurse. One day in 1933, a blood vessel burst in Teasdale's hand, which the poet interpreted as a sure sign of an impending stroke; convinced of her grim fate, she decided to skip the formalities and take a massive overdose of sleeping pills. The coroner later reported that she'd been in perfect health.
Often, our stress level depends more on how we perceive a set of cognitive variables than on the specific demands of that situation. (p. 109)
Morgan claims that the way we talk to ourselves about stressors is equally important. How you frame something in your head has a great deal to do with your neurobiological response to it, he told me. Once you start saying to yourself Oh my goodness, this is awful, you begin releasing more cortisol and start this cascade of alarm. But when you say to yourself, I know what to do here, or see things as a challenge, then that turns into a much more positive response. p. 112
...Maddi is adamant that any one of us can instill these resilient attitudes. We know we can train people to increase their hardiness, Maddi said. It involves showing people how to deal with their stressful circumstances through problem solving, coping skills, social support, and effective self-care--rather than just giving up. Hardiness trainees learn to identify their stressors and to challenge their negative beliefs about them, like the idea that they're helpless to change a tough situation or that it's safer to give up on a problem when it grows difficult. They practice setting goals and taking small steps toward accomplishing them, slowly building up thir sense of control over their own destiny. In talk sessions, therapists help them to put their stressors into perspective: they see how turmoil often leads to accomplishments and personal growth and how change is an essential element of life. p 115
After obwerving countless assaults, Wigram began to pick up on a peculiar pattern in each twenty-two man platoon. Whenever a platoon ran into enemy fire, Wigram noted, the troops would react in three very distinct ways. Without fail, a few soldiers would go to pieces and "start making tracks for home." Another handful of men would respond valiantly, opening fire and advancing. And the majority of the troops? Wigram said they would enter a state of bewilderment, unsure of how to act; they became "sheep" and would only do their duty when prodded by a strong, decisive leader. p. 240
This treacherous freezing reaction is startlingly common in crises. In the 1970s, the psychologist Daniel Johnson found that when he asked subjects to perform a chllenging and novel task under high pressure, 45% of them shut down and stopped moving for minimum of thirty seconds. They just quit functioning, he later told the Time reporter Amnda Ripley, they just sat there. Under life threatening stress, complex brain processing plummets and the neural mainframe often maxes out, leaving us with instinctive reactions and deeply worn routines; it's as if such an experience can be too monumentl for the brain to compute. Leach says that even in the most ideal of circumstances, the brain needs at least eight to ten seconds to process an unfamiliar situation, but intense fear and stress make that task even tougher. When our brains search their data banks for the right course of action in extreme danger and come up empty, Leach claims, they shut down. We freeze. We do nothing. p244
In combat you do not rise to the occasion--you sink to the level of your training. None of us cn safely rely upon antasies of our innate heroism when the moment calls for it, Grossman says, because a life-threatening crisis makes our normal experience of reality fall apart. Only the man who prepares for disaster can hope to respond well.
...in the middle of this panic-fueled dash, a miracle happened: Kummerfeldt's training kicked in. This little voice in my head said, hey dummy, go sit down, he recaleld. So I went over to a log and sat down. This is precisely what he advises lost hikers to do today--to get off their feet. Next Kummerfeldt followed his second protocol: he took a drink of water. A drink of water is incredibly clming, he explained...These two things, getting off your feet and hving a drink of water, are two absolutely incredible lifesaving steps. p. 257
It is what we do with that fear reaction that determines our fate, Kummerfeldt says. In his classes today, Kummerfeldt teachers a model called STOP to get through wilderness survival situations: stop what you're soing, sit down, and let the adrenaline subside; think about your options; observe your environment; and plan how best to survive. Then get to work. p258
Bravery isn't being fearless. Bravery is being scared and doing the right thing anyway. p266
By now the overarching point should be clear. How did Cooper really stay cool under life-threatening pressure? The same way everyone else we've met did it: by working with fear instead of needlessly wasting energy fighting it, by focusing on what needs to be done instead of on worries, and by taking action. Cooper wasn't necessarily good at not feeling afraid...what Cooper had become good at was making this fear irrelevant. p271
How to be afraid:
1. Breathe. (square breathing)
2. put your feelings into words. Talking or writing about an emotion like fear helps the brain to prosses it behind the scenes; it allows the mine to sort out thoughts and feelings instead of just churning over them repeatedly...s;eaking compassionately and honestly about emotions, without judgement or sel-blame, helps us come to terms with them....William Faulkner once wrote, I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
3. Train, practice, prepare. If an upcoming presentation has you anxious, rehearse it under realistic, flexible conditions until delivering it becomes routine.
4. Redirect focus--concentrate on th epresent moment and the task at hand....psychologists say that even pausing a few times a day and being present for a moment with what's going on around you (rather than with the monologue in your head) can help you to better inhabit the current moment.
5. Mindfully disentangle from worries and anxious thoughts--be mindful, watch your worries and let them coast by without getting entangled with them, or postpone worry--write it down and agree that later on you can worry about it for 30 minutes, which frees you up to focus on the moment. Over time, she says, you learn to better manage your anxious thoughts and they no longer run the show.
6. Expose yourself to your fears. If you want to remain locked into a fear indefinitely, then by ll means, avoid the situations tht make you anxious. But if you want to give your amygdala a chance to get over a fear, you must expose yourself to the things and ideas that scare you.
7. Learn to accept uncertainty and lack of control. Suppose you're worried you might be laid off from your job...if you bask in your uncertainty, (that is, expose yourself to your fear about the future), repeating the distressing thought "It's possible I could be laid off" to yourself without resisting your anxious emotional reaction, then you (and your amygdala) will eventually begin habituating to it. With enough exposre, the idea loses its power and becomes almost dull.
8. Reframe teh sitution--stay grounded in reason and remind ourself of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation. When you change the wy you ppraise a situation, you chnge your emotional response to it.
9. Joke around--helps us break out of a negtive point of view and see things differently.
10. Build faith in yourself.
11. Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
12. Open up to fear unconditionally. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it desolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress...
Acceptance and commitment therapy--Steven Hayes
The most legendary hypochondriac in history, though, was the poet Sara Teasdale, who even employed her own full-time nurse. One day in 1933, a blood vessel burst in Teasdale's hand, which the poet interpreted as a sure sign of an impending stroke; convinced of her grim fate, she decided to skip the formalities and take a massive overdose of sleeping pills. The coroner later reported that she'd been in perfect health.
Often, our stress level depends more on how we perceive a set of cognitive variables than on the specific demands of that situation. (p. 109)
Morgan claims that the way we talk to ourselves about stressors is equally important. How you frame something in your head has a great deal to do with your neurobiological response to it, he told me. Once you start saying to yourself Oh my goodness, this is awful, you begin releasing more cortisol and start this cascade of alarm. But when you say to yourself, I know what to do here, or see things as a challenge, then that turns into a much more positive response. p. 112
...Maddi is adamant that any one of us can instill these resilient attitudes. We know we can train people to increase their hardiness, Maddi said. It involves showing people how to deal with their stressful circumstances through problem solving, coping skills, social support, and effective self-care--rather than just giving up. Hardiness trainees learn to identify their stressors and to challenge their negative beliefs about them, like the idea that they're helpless to change a tough situation or that it's safer to give up on a problem when it grows difficult. They practice setting goals and taking small steps toward accomplishing them, slowly building up thir sense of control over their own destiny. In talk sessions, therapists help them to put their stressors into perspective: they see how turmoil often leads to accomplishments and personal growth and how change is an essential element of life. p 115
After obwerving countless assaults, Wigram began to pick up on a peculiar pattern in each twenty-two man platoon. Whenever a platoon ran into enemy fire, Wigram noted, the troops would react in three very distinct ways. Without fail, a few soldiers would go to pieces and "start making tracks for home." Another handful of men would respond valiantly, opening fire and advancing. And the majority of the troops? Wigram said they would enter a state of bewilderment, unsure of how to act; they became "sheep" and would only do their duty when prodded by a strong, decisive leader. p. 240
This treacherous freezing reaction is startlingly common in crises. In the 1970s, the psychologist Daniel Johnson found that when he asked subjects to perform a chllenging and novel task under high pressure, 45% of them shut down and stopped moving for minimum of thirty seconds. They just quit functioning, he later told the Time reporter Amnda Ripley, they just sat there. Under life threatening stress, complex brain processing plummets and the neural mainframe often maxes out, leaving us with instinctive reactions and deeply worn routines; it's as if such an experience can be too monumentl for the brain to compute. Leach says that even in the most ideal of circumstances, the brain needs at least eight to ten seconds to process an unfamiliar situation, but intense fear and stress make that task even tougher. When our brains search their data banks for the right course of action in extreme danger and come up empty, Leach claims, they shut down. We freeze. We do nothing. p244
In combat you do not rise to the occasion--you sink to the level of your training. None of us cn safely rely upon antasies of our innate heroism when the moment calls for it, Grossman says, because a life-threatening crisis makes our normal experience of reality fall apart. Only the man who prepares for disaster can hope to respond well.
...in the middle of this panic-fueled dash, a miracle happened: Kummerfeldt's training kicked in. This little voice in my head said, hey dummy, go sit down, he recaleld. So I went over to a log and sat down. This is precisely what he advises lost hikers to do today--to get off their feet. Next Kummerfeldt followed his second protocol: he took a drink of water. A drink of water is incredibly clming, he explained...These two things, getting off your feet and hving a drink of water, are two absolutely incredible lifesaving steps. p. 257
It is what we do with that fear reaction that determines our fate, Kummerfeldt says. In his classes today, Kummerfeldt teachers a model called STOP to get through wilderness survival situations: stop what you're soing, sit down, and let the adrenaline subside; think about your options; observe your environment; and plan how best to survive. Then get to work. p258
Bravery isn't being fearless. Bravery is being scared and doing the right thing anyway. p266
By now the overarching point should be clear. How did Cooper really stay cool under life-threatening pressure? The same way everyone else we've met did it: by working with fear instead of needlessly wasting energy fighting it, by focusing on what needs to be done instead of on worries, and by taking action. Cooper wasn't necessarily good at not feeling afraid...what Cooper had become good at was making this fear irrelevant. p271
How to be afraid:
1. Breathe. (square breathing)
2. put your feelings into words. Talking or writing about an emotion like fear helps the brain to prosses it behind the scenes; it allows the mine to sort out thoughts and feelings instead of just churning over them repeatedly...s;eaking compassionately and honestly about emotions, without judgement or sel-blame, helps us come to terms with them....William Faulkner once wrote, I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
3. Train, practice, prepare. If an upcoming presentation has you anxious, rehearse it under realistic, flexible conditions until delivering it becomes routine.
4. Redirect focus--concentrate on th epresent moment and the task at hand....psychologists say that even pausing a few times a day and being present for a moment with what's going on around you (rather than with the monologue in your head) can help you to better inhabit the current moment.
5. Mindfully disentangle from worries and anxious thoughts--be mindful, watch your worries and let them coast by without getting entangled with them, or postpone worry--write it down and agree that later on you can worry about it for 30 minutes, which frees you up to focus on the moment. Over time, she says, you learn to better manage your anxious thoughts and they no longer run the show.
6. Expose yourself to your fears. If you want to remain locked into a fear indefinitely, then by ll means, avoid the situations tht make you anxious. But if you want to give your amygdala a chance to get over a fear, you must expose yourself to the things and ideas that scare you.
7. Learn to accept uncertainty and lack of control. Suppose you're worried you might be laid off from your job...if you bask in your uncertainty, (that is, expose yourself to your fear about the future), repeating the distressing thought "It's possible I could be laid off" to yourself without resisting your anxious emotional reaction, then you (and your amygdala) will eventually begin habituating to it. With enough exposre, the idea loses its power and becomes almost dull.
8. Reframe teh sitution--stay grounded in reason and remind ourself of the doubtlessly more positive reality of our situation. When you change the wy you ppraise a situation, you chnge your emotional response to it.
9. Joke around--helps us break out of a negtive point of view and see things differently.
10. Build faith in yourself.
11. Keep your eyes on a guiding principle.
12. Open up to fear unconditionally. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it desolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress...
Acceptance and commitment therapy--Steven Hayes
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